


The Ideal Adventuring Party is {a Warrior and Three Mages, a Liberati and Three Fugitives}

by Cryptographic_Delurk



Series: The Ideal Adventuring Party is... [1]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Angst, Gen, More like Revolutionary Inaction, Past Fenris/Isabela - Freeform, Past Isabela/Merrill - Freeform, Post-Kirkwall, Pre-Relationship, Proto Industrial, Revolutionary Action, Slavery, Tevinter Imperium, Unofficial Worldbuilding, social caste, sorry about the funny title it’s not a funny story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-21
Updated: 2020-05-21
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:48:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24293869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cryptographic_Delurk/pseuds/Cryptographic_Delurk
Summary: Fenris returns to Tevinter to rescue slaves and take down magisters, but he can barely figure out how to cope with living in a room with three mages, let alone figure out how to start a slave rebellion.
Relationships: Anders & Fenris & Merrill (Dragon Age), Anders & Fenris (Dragon Age), Fenris & Merrill (Dragon Age), Fenris & Varania (Dragon Age)
Series: The Ideal Adventuring Party is... [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1753798
Comments: 12
Kudos: 27





	The Ideal Adventuring Party is {a Warrior and Three Mages, a Liberati and Three Fugitives}

**Author's Note:**

> The amount of canon that this is based on is Origins, Awakening, DAII, and then whatever I felt like using from the Dragon Age wiki. There are at least a couple of other lore and story divergences.
> 
> Non-exhaustive list of Content Warnings: Canon-typical portrayals of slavery. Violence as it does and doesn’t intersect with systemic power. Fantastical Racism. Not-at-all-fantastical Colourism. Somewhat harsh interpretations of the characters. It’s a story about Fenris returning to an abusive and oppressive environment after a traumatic event rendered him unable to remain in Kirkwall, and all the mental baggage related to that. Characters are both mentally and physically compromised. Unreliable narration. No, I am not qualified to write this fic.
> 
> Read & Relax.

“I remember you,” he says.

There’s a tense moment, where Varania only crosses her legs. She tugs at a ringlet of rusty brown hair and curls it around her finger. Then she looks at Fenris, and her eyes are full of spite.

“As you should. I’m your _sister_ ,” she says. Slowly, like she’s explaining to a halfwit.

“No,” Fenris says, because he’s not talking about that pleasant haze of childhood running about the gardens, oblivious to the intense instability of the world around them. “I remember you from after that. I was Danarius’s bodyguard. You came to the manor and worked as an indentured servant for the space of a week or two. I remember you watching me.”

He tries to remember what he thought of her at the time. Perhaps he’d been amused and flattered by her interest, or ashamed of how he must have looked in Danarius’s Sareebas collar, maybe scornful of the impropriety and presumptuousness of an elvhen Liberati. But none of them rang as true as the fact that he may simply have noticed her watching and that was all. At the time, he’d not been a person allowed to have feelings or intuitions or judgements about an elvhen lady watching him. He’d been an object that stared impassively as others moved around him, cataloguing observations and potential threats in a mild and mindless kind of way, until Danarius gave the order for him to act.

Varania frowns. “Yes,” she agrees, “we crossed paths briefly sometime in the aftermath of your… ritual.”

“ _My_ ritual?!” Fenris demands. “Is that what you’ll call it? A man cuts burning lyrium into my skin for his own gain and his own sick curiosity! But it’s _my_ ritual, not his?!”

Varania seems unmoved. She purses her lips, and Fenris isn’t used to this. Not anymore. He’s used to Kirkwall, where anyone he dared to tell about his markings would gratify him with anything from an involuntary grimace (Anders) to a crooning platitude (Merrill). But Varania has seen the same slavery he has, she has stood to the side of all such experiments and rituals and blood magic sacrifices, and whatever her other feelings about them she cannot muster anything like outrage.

Fenris hates this place.

“So-!” Fenris prompts, trying swiftly to redirect back to his original point. “Why were you at Danarius’s?! You say I fought for these markings, fought to earn a boon for your freedom! And you thought to come throw my gift back in my face?!”

When Varania slams her palm against the table, Fenris does flinch. He’s become soft, he sees.

“Where was I meant to go?!” she hisses furiously. “Mother was sick! I could find no job, and had no money for a doctor! At least when we were slaves, Danarius saw to our health, made sure his property didn’t grow sickly and die on him.”

“Not before he had need of you to fuel his blood magic at least,” Fenris snarls.

“Like that was ever a problem for you!” Varania cuts him off. “Danarius’s fighter, Danarius’s bodyguard, Danarius’s pet! You’d have been the last slave he chose for sacrifice! Don’t talk like you know better than I what I risked!” Varania’s eyes flash, and Fenris realises suddenly her hands are shaking. “Fat lot of good it did in the end, coming home to a brother that didn’t recognise me. And Mother dead in the end anyhow.”

“Did you snicker to yourself?” Fenris sneers. He doesn’t care right now if he’s being cruel. “Your fool brother stumbling around like a Saarebas – too stupid to know you? While you walked around the kitchens and laundry giving orders?”

“Yes!” And then the sarcasm is so laid so thick it makes her words seem dripped with sludge and poison. “Yes, I had such a fun time! Watching my mother whither from consumption while my brother stood by in blissful oblivion, refusing to even meet my eye! What a blessing to be given this _boon_ of freedom, and not even be able to take you to task for it, since you’d forgotten all about it!” And then all that’s left is truth. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, I did laugh at you, kowtowing after Danarius in your stupid collar. That your hubris had led us to equally unhappy places seemed the only justice in the world.”

==

It’s easier to find her than Fenris expects. He still has a scrawled address from their last letter, from nearly a year ago and time for several sea crossings. He does not find her at this first location, but the elves in the building know where she has moved since.

Their hosts eye Merrill’s vallaslin, then his lyrium brands, then the human inexplicably crouched behind them like a shadow. They choose, wisely, not to ask.

The next room sits above a warehouse that processes rubber, but nobody in the building seems to notice the stench. Fenris himself does a passable job of ignoring it, but Merrill pinches her nose in a way that the residents immediately read as snobbery. But if they’re offended, or if they find Merrill’s impression of a courier less than convincing, it doesn’t stop them from fetching who she asks for. The residents are ten to a room, bedrolls lined up like canned sardines, and yet there’s no love lost between any of them.

“Yes, I’ve a message for you,” Merrill lures her out into the hall. “It’s only that- your brother would like to speak to you.”

There’s a moment, when Varania’s eyes dart wildly, and then find Fenris where he’s leaning against the wall, wearing a hooded travel cloak. And then it’s panic, an aborted shudder of breath, and her voice starts to climb when Fenris crosses the hall in an instance and grabs her by the throat.

“You call for help and it will be the last thing you do,” he says. “Hawke isn’t here to stop me this time.”

He watches as Varania’s eyes dart to Merrill behind him, and he turns to see what she does. Merrill is staring resolutely at the opposite wall.

Anders is watching, though. Grim and silent and buried under what seems a crippling weight of black feathers. It is unsettling.

Fenris turns back to Varania. “You will take us somewhere private to talk. Are we clear?” And it doesn’t matter that Varania’s eyes look like they’d like to burn holes in him, because she nods.

She takes them to a communal kitchen, somewhere in the basement of the warehouse. With a water pump, and industrial sink and a bench which they all collapse against. Merrill is chatting idly about the impossibility of entertaining guests in such a place. And shouldn’t there be tea? At least water? Merrill will get them some water. And eventually Varania stands, pulls a kettle out of a cupboard, and stomps to the pump. A small flame appears in her hand, and she heats the water, as Merrill fusses around her – and, yes, Fenris knows this and therefore should expect it. She is a mage. They are all mages, around him.

When Varania returns to her seat, having passed the kettle back to Merrill and shooed her in the direction of the cups, Fenris asks in Tevene. “Why did you do it?”

It’s like breaking a dam.

“Why do you think?” Varania demands. “Were you even thinking at all?! Did you think your post wouldn’t be intercepted? That we weren’t being watched? Do you think I wanted Danarius to approach me? To say that I had better cooperate if I didn’t want to be imprisoned for aiding and abetting an escaped slave? I would have been happier if I never heard from you again!”

He had always known it was a risk he was taking in contacting Varania. Had always paid extra to try to obscure the passage the letters took and ensure their uninterrupted arrival. _Don’t you worry, Broody,_ Varric had said as he licked the quill and pressed the wax seal to the notes Fenris had him transcribe. _My contacts will see to it._ But there was only so much that could be done, and Fenris supposed Danarius had always had the advantage, knowing where the missives were bound to end up.

Still-

“You didn’t sell me out to avoid punishment!” Fenris accuses. “You sold me out so you could be a Laetan!”

“Yes!?” Varania questions, matching his intensity without seeming to understand it. And Fenris struggles to place her confusion, before it comes to him. She expects him to be grateful she held out against Danarius’s threats, until Danarius saw fit to roll out the rewards. It had been a favourite tactic of his former master’s, and they both thought like slaves. Danarius would get what he wanted in the end, they assumed, so the most they could do was manoeuvrer the terms of his success to their favour.

“Oh, it’s very hot!” Merrill says, as she shoves two cups of hot water between them on the table. “Try not to burn yourself. If you haven’t already on all those scalding words.”

Fenris turns to glare at her. But Merrill has already moved on. She sets a cup in front of Anders too, though the man does not reach for it.

Varania cradles her own cup in her hands. “Is she yours?” she asks.

“What?! No!” Fenris responds. And then he realises what Varania is asking is probably less about literal ownership, and something more intimate and personal. It is equally unsettling and repulsive.

“Why is there a shem?” she asks. And Fenris is secretly impressed that she has fallen so easily into talking about Anders as if he were blind and deaf and not sitting _right there_ to hear her. It had taken the rest of them weeks of Anders’s despondent silence to assume that pattern.

“A shem is good to have when he owes you favours,” Varania announces. “Though he is less good to have for a friend. I suppose it’s too much to ask that he is in the city legally?”

“You will find us a room, and sign the contract for it in your own name,” Fenris says, which is an answer in its own way. He reaches into his cloak, and deposits a bag of gold sovereigns on the bench in front of her. It is not the right currency, but she will be able to exchange it with the dwarves. “You will skip work tomorrow, if you must, and find a room for the four of us.”

It’s foolish, and he knows it. She is not trustworthy. He is in a room with three mages and none of them are trustworthy. But he must be here, in this city. And in this city, they are the only three people he knows.

“Leto…” Varania sighs. She sounds sad, almost sentimental, like she had when he’d first walked in to greet her at the Hanged Man.

“You will _not_ call me that.”

“It is the name your _mother_ gave you,” Varania says, now angry again. “And you are casting it aside for the one your doting master would call you?!”

Her words sting, having hit on some truth too cruel to name, but his resolve remains. Fenris does not know how to explain that he hates Leto more than even Danarius. For Danarius’s evils are a long and varied list, as clear and plain to Fenris as the shorter list of virtues he tries his best not to ruminate on. But Leto is an unknown, a collection of tattered memories that don’t quite fit. And for reasons that Fenris still can not comprehend, Leto had sold Fenris’s family and identity and every centimetre of his body for the freedom of two mages. And Fenris hates him for it.

“You will not call me that,” Fenris reiterates.

Varania scowls and, though it appears she has more to say, in the end she only reaches forward for the bag of coin.

==

The room is a room. It is in a tall narrow building full of rooms, and only rooms, and not the smell of rubber or fish, for which Fenris is grateful.

The room has four white walls, a door, and one window with wavy glass that’s placed high enough on the wall that nobody can spy inside. The room also has a black iron furnace, whose chimney snakes up through the ceiling, It’s the only appliance in the room. Other than that, it’s only chamber pots and the communal water pump in the basement.

The three of them spread out evenly across the room – Fenris, Merrill, Varania. The fourth of them, Anders, sits down in one corner, and has not moved since.

The building that the room is in sits in something that is not an alienage – for there is no edict as there was in Kirkwall that dictates the elvhen and human Liberati live apart – but is basically an alienage. The only people that live here are elves, _Liberati_ elves. And the only other regular visitors are of the elves of the Servus Publicus. It seems entirely possible, living here, that you might mistake Minrathous for a city of elves and only elves. Which makes Anders something of an oddity. But it’s not like it matters when he won’t leave the room.

So that was the room.

“I hope it was worth it,” Varania snarls. “It cost me my job.”

Fenris takes it with a grain of salt. The room is a step up from her last place of residence, entirely due to Fenris’s coin. The following day, Varania leaves the room to go ask for work. She tells him she was working as a laundress at her last job, and she’d like to do that again. Or perhaps tailor clothes, like she had in Qarinus.

Merrill sleeps the first day, attributing her lethargy to leftover sea legs. “Isabela had the nicest sea legs,” she says dreamily. “I don’t think mine were nearly so plush, not to mention so steady. It couldn’t be helped when she wouldn’t come with us. But I miss her. Don’t you?”

Fenris only grunts. He is bitter hearing this from Merrill, although he should not be any longer. The reason for any such rivalry between them is past, and he wonders if Isabela will always be a point of contention between them, even when her lips and tits and arse are not even there for them to fight over.

The next day Merrill is up. “I think it’s quite sad that this alienage is missing its vhenadahl,” she informs him. “There is nothing for the children to climb. Or to urinate on.”

“This place probably _would_ smell better if more of its inhabitants took to urinating in public,” Fenris says, unsure of whether or not he’s joking. “And this is not an alienage.”

“It might as well be,” Merrill says, echoing thoughts he’s already had. “And it should have a vhenadahl. I’ll go find something suitable to plant.”

“I don’t see how you plan to have a giant painted oak set up in the lot next door before the day is done.”

“You act such a shem sometimes, Fenris,” Merrill says, and leaves. And Fenris spends the rest of the day trying to ignore how much more uncomfortable it is with only him and Anders in the room.

The drink and dry rations Isabela had left him with run dry the next day, and Fenris reminds himself he has not come to Minrathous to sit in an empty room in the slums. It’s a simple group of tasks he sets himself to – exchanging coin, purchasing food, and checking the boards at the taverns for mercenary work. But his main objective is to refamiliarise himself with the city.

Danarius had brought him here before, visits to the capital that were necessitated by either business or pleasure. But Fenris had kept to Danarius’s side the entire time, and so had spent much of his time in Minrathous at the estates in the uplands, some outside the city proper. Or visiting the Circle of Magi. The Coliseum. The Imperial Chantry. The Slave Auction. Ivory Towers, both figurative and literal. They are places he can’t return too. Even if his brands aren’t recognised by some ghost from his past, his pointed ears and dark skin and calloused hands and any other number of things about his demeanour will keep him from passing as anything other than a Liberati or unchaperoned slave. And some guard will ask him for identification papers he doesn’t have, and then it will all be over.

But for now there are other places in Minrathous to see. And the part of his mind that belongs to Fenris is a meticulous catalogue when it comes to the things he’s heard and the places he’s been. So the only conclusion is there are a lot of places here he’s never seen before.

Minrathous is a shore, and a floodplain, and a river, and cliffs cut high on both sides before rolling green field. He had not seen much of the wharf when he came in, it was only the barest of dawn when Isabela arranged for the docking. And he does not want to see much more of it from up close – it had smelled so rank and foul, like rotting fish. But he chooses a vantage point from a roof in the craftsmen’s quarters and watches the ships roll out with goods and soldiers, and in with refugees, so many refugees. And Fenris wonders if the floes of garbage and waste jutting out into the harbour and past the breakwater are new, because he thinks he would have remembered seeing them perched from Danarius’s lap, no matter how otherwise sanitised the view was.

Apart from the area near the coast with its warehouses and factories and slums inhabited by the elvhen Liberati, there are quarters in the shadow of the cliffs set aside for scribes and merchants and craftsmen, mostly Soporati or Dwarven. There is a Dwarven Embassy in one of these areas, and it is large and opulent, where a block of the city meant for a similar coalescence of free Vashoth is small and impoverished. Human labourers counted either among the Soporati or Liberati have their own residential areas in the city (as do the Laetans, though this is another area Fenris will not visit). And instead of one large market, everywhere Fenris goes there are small concentrated smatterings of storefronts and taverns and parks, all of varying cleanliness and quality as they mean to attend different social strata within the city.

The belly of the city is in the floodplains. It is filled with empty lots, crumbling walls that may once have been part of buildings, and refugees most of all. Most specifically the refugees with nothing else left to rely on. They squat in temporary camps that scatter and reform just as fast. In such a stratified city, the refugees are casteless in their own way – regardless of what their identification papers say.

There are also many slaves in the city, but not nearly enough to outnumber free men, as they would in Tevinter’s countryside. The cost of keeping slaves in the densely populated city is higher than the wages for the endless circulation of Liberati and Soporati labourers, who have gathered in this metropolis for having been outcompeted for work elsewhere. (It is not surprising that Varania had ended up in Qarinus, and then Minrathous.)

There are only two communal slave barracks that Fenris can identify. One is part of Tevinter’s military complex, which sits four miles out of the city with its own seaport, ready to defend the capital in case of Qunari invasion. The second is located in the shadow of the Circle, for the Servus Publicus, who attend to any number of issues pertaining to the upkeep and cleanliness of the city and its crumbling infrastructure. The majority of slaves within the city are isolated servants in the homes of their free masters – cherished cooks and nurses and bodyguards, as Fenris once was.

Fenris grimaces, because if he intends to mobilise Tevinter slaves, he might have chosen a place where they exist not as scattered stars surrounded by enemies.

When the sun starts to sink into the horizon, Fenris has spent most of the day moving about the city as if fleeing from something. He moves quickly, memorizing buildings and landmarks, profiling the people associated with them, and swiftly changing direction anytime it looks like he’s about to cross paths with anyone who might question who he is.

He’s checked the job listings at several taverns, but is repulsed to find that most of them lead back to the Circle. The difference between the different listings apparently being the audience they intend to tailor to, rather than the party hiring. There are a distressing number of jobs aimed at the recapture of escaped slaves, and even the ones for less objectionable tasks are commissioned by the same names. It leaves too sour a taste in Fenris’s mouth to think he might be helping a magister, no matter in what capacity.

In the end, Fenris stops by the market that is meant for people like him and pays with gold coins that are incrementally too large for the transactions being made. He buys dried strips of mango and plum and spiced meat, which were the kinds of foods that Isabela stocked on her ship and that Fenris has every reason to be sick of at this point. But eating is rarely a pleasure, and at least dried rations don’t require cooking.

When Fenris returns to the room, he’s surprised to find it more full than he left it. With a wreath of herbs hung above the door, a rickety table, and a figurine of a halla sitting in its centre.

“Welcome back,” Merrill says. “You just missed the people who brought the table over. They had lots of terribly funny stories and bad opinions. I think you might have liked them, Fenris.”

After a day walking an unfamiliar wasteland, it feels like walking into someone else’s home, and stings with unexpected betrayal. Fenris never thought he’d feel homesick for a mansion filled with bad blood and broken glass.

==

“There are many things I’ve learned, since I’ve arrived.” Merrill says, as she drops a dollop of syrup over some flatbread. “Vanarel showed me all the best gardens in the city. I got lost half a dozen times and managed to find myself again. And Athesa said she could give me lessons in Tevene.”

It strikes Fenris that Merrill is treating this like a vacation, and not like… whatever it is. It does not endear her to him.

“And what do you need to know Tevene for?” Fenris grouses. “Most people in Minrathous know the trade tongue.” It had surprised him a little that Varania defaulted to it, and not to Tevene.

“But I want to talk to more than just most people,” Merrill retorts, now slicing a banana over her creation. “And we are in Tevinter. Should I not learn Tevene?”

Fenris scowls, down at his lap, then up to Varania sitting across from him. It was nice, he thought in the abstract, to have a language to separate the two of them from the ears of the foreigners sharing the room.

Varania seems to read this in him somehow. “ _She’s not wrong to want to learn. What does it matter?_ ”

“ _I suppose it doesn’t,_ ” Fenris admits. And it’s a second before he realises he’s spoken in a different language entirely. His face scrunches, and it comes to him what he’s forgotten.

Varania’s expression is almost soft for a moment.

“Oooh, another one,” Merrill chirps. “What is it called?”

“It has no name,” Fenris says, although this is not precisely true. Only its name is the word for language rendered in its own tongue – like whoever had created it thought in their hubris it would be the first and last and only, when in reality it had never been any of that.

“ _Vedda_ _h_ ,” Varania answers at the same time. “ _There are others from Seheron. But no one speaks it anymore. If they ever did._ ”

Varania is whispering down into her hands. And Fenris doesn’t know if her vulnerability unsettles him more or less than the way she casually reduces both of them to _no one_.

Varania recovers, and turns to Merrill. “You know I could teach you Tevene,” she says curtly.

“That is kind of you to offer, lethallan,” Merrill says, although her voice is dry and insincere. “But Athesa is bedridden in her nephew’s household. And it will be as good for me to visit her for lessons, as it will be for her to have a way to contribute.”

Varania’s nose scrunches, like this rejection has cost her something. Fenris struggles to place it for a moment, before Varania opens her mouth and tries again.

“You are a mage.”

“I am.” Merrill agrees. She folded her flatbread into her mouth, not so much as blinking at the non sequitur. “So are you.”

“But I am not,” Varania frowns. “Not like you. You’ve had training – not just to hold your powers in and keep yourself steeled against demons. You’ve been trained to really use your gift. To fight.”

“Anders has, too.” Merrill says. “We’ve both been trained. Under different circumstances. By different people.”

Merrill is deflecting, but Fenris fails to see the purpose in it.

Varania is apparently of a similar mind. Her sharp words cut through Merrill’s misdirection. “I want to learn how to use magic. The magisters-” (Varania spits this word with nearly as much hatred as Fenris himself does) “-use magic to destroy, and heal. To compel the living as well as the dead. To control wind and water. They can move mountains with their mind. And I can do none of it. I would teach you Tevene, if you taught me magic. But if that doesn’t suit you, I’d pay you anything I could.”

“You should not be so desperate, lethallan.” Merrill answers softly between bites of her food. In stark contrast to Varania’s intensity. “Demons will seek you out, and whispers all sorts of promises, for someone who will pay anything.”

“I offered to pay _you_ anything. _You-_ ” Varania trills, “are no demon.”

Merrill’s ears fold flat against her head. She glances, nervous and pleading, to Fenris. For the first time since the conversation had taken this unfortunate turn.

Fenris hunches his shoulders and crosses his arms over his chest. Truly, this is far past the point in the conversation where Merrill must have expected him to intervene. But what is there to say? Merrill has made it clear, time and time again, that she will do whatever she damn well pleases. And Varania- Is he to convince his sister not to master the skills she needs to defend herself? With what argument, he wonders. Should he preach to her the evils of the magisters, the demons they summoned at parties, the corruption of their blood magic rituals, as if she did not know? What could convince her, if the life she’d led as a slave had not sufficiently taught her?

Merrill seems to realise there is nothing in Fenris’s scowl that will help her. She turns back to Varania.

“You do not have to pay me, lethallan. It is the responsibility of a Keeper and their First to share and spread knowledge amongst The People. I would do no less for you than the others.”

“You’ll do it for nothing? Hah!” Varania laughs unkindly. “No money? No promise of debt repaid? Not even a reassurance?”

“Reassurance?” Merrill repeats.

“That I will not turn the lessons you have taught me against you, once I have mastered them,” Varania explains. “It is a common stipulation, in deals struck between members of the Imperial Circle. Often sealed with a blood pact.”

There is a sadism in Varania’s sneer that Fenris remembers seeing once or twice in a mirror, and a recklessness to match. There is little point in attempting to provoke Merrill, a blood mage in the height of her power, who has upwards of seven years combat experience and a three digit body count on Varania. Merrill might be the most dangerous person in this entire city ward, the only possible exceptions being Fenris himself and the abomination in the corner.

But, looking between the two women sitting across from him, Fenris finds it odd how much he trusts Merrill by comparison. He is not entirely unafraid of her – he’d be a fool not to be. But he feels oddly, foolishly certain that Merrill will not suddenly stab her hand and bind him to her thrall. She had not ever, in all their years in Kirkwall, and it seemed unlikely she would start now.

He could not say the same for Varania, given access to a knife and the knowledge of how to use it.

“No, I don’t think I’ll be needing any reassurance,” Merrill dismisses the idea with no more than a few wide-eyed blinks. “You misunderstand. I am not offering you something that is not already yours. It is your magic, your power. It is as if I am returning a key – one that has long been stolen – to a locked chest you already own. What you choose to do with the contents of that chest, once opened, will be considered a separate matter.”

“If that’s how it pleases you to look at it,” Varania snorts. She leans back in her chair and shoots Fenris a triumphant smirk, as if Merrill was the one to exit that conversation looking the fool.

==

There are many things Fenris should do.

But what he ends up doing is staring at his reflection in a window pane. He tries to pick out the features that mark him not only as an elf and a slave, but as someone from the mountains and jungles of Seheron – perhaps a particular cut of the eyes or the brows, to match the dark brown skin.

He walks around the city, looking for other people with these same features. But either he’s not very good at picking them out, or there are none to be found. No – Seheron is a large island, and there must be Tevinter refugees from Seheron in the city. But how many would speak the nameless language Fenris and Varania did?

He ends up at the wharf, even though the smell burns his nose. He looks east across the water, and pretends that he can see the rising land in the distance. The memories drip back into Fenris like hot wax. His mother. His sister. Varania’s father, for a time, before he was commanded off to war. Off to die. Even Danarius he remembers new things about – he’d been a distant and majestic figure, much less immediate in Leto’s mind than the various drivers and overseers who tormented Mother. Leto had been introduced to Danarius all of two times, during Danarius’s tours of the estate, and then only caught tiny glimpses of him across the gardens. Before Leto won a tournament, and Danarius became Fenris’s entire world.

The memories dial back down. Start from the top. And Fenris lets himself be filled with Leto and Seheron again. Mother filled her hands with water. And Leto watched as it slowly crystallised to ice, and laughed when she pressed it against his forehead, trying to break away the tropical heat. And Varania had whined because when was it her turn. And Leto and his sister wrenched Indian sunburns into each others arms just because they could. And the two of them had maybe never truly been kind to each other. But there had been a time when they were together, and hadn’t yet known how cruel they really were, and could laugh about it. And the memories peter out again, as Fenris finds more old offences to find new anger about.

He looks across the water to where he can’t see Seheron. And he realises that, more than it pains him to be back in Tevinter, it pains him to have come so close and still not be back. But there is no Mother back on Seheron. No Fog Warriors. No Danarius. And the sister he barely remembers is here in Minrathous. And Seheron is overrun by the Qun now. This is the end of the road, and there is no home to go back to.

He returns to the room. Varania is still out. As is Merrill. And it takes him a moment to realise there is an additional figure missing. One that he thought so paralysed and immobile, it might as well be a disused piece of furniture blended into the wall.

The sun has dropped another fourteen degrees in the sky, before Anders slinks back through the door. He does not even look at Fenris, but shuffles into the room and drops into the corner as if he never left. And this is the beginning of a whole new set of worries to occupy Fenris’s time.

==

At first Fenris had assumed that Varania’s long hours away from the house were filled with idle wandering, visits to acquaintances, the avoidance of himself and their other roommates. But if these are things that occupy a place in Varania’s life and mind, she has mastered the art of making them seem absent. What she speaks of, endlessly and tirelessly, is work.

“It’s not what I wanted,” Varania says. “I’m combing hemp fibre, for it to be wound and spun into yarn. I’m to be in a warehouse with many others, but it’s cleaner, further inland from those around here… It is not what I wanted,” she repeats, “but it will do until I can find better.”

“As you say,” Fenris agrees. He is lying on his back, with his butt up against the wall. His legs are stretched up and he examines his toes as he wiggles them against the white plaster.

“And what will you be doing?” Varania asks, as she ties the shawl at her neck and flattens her skirt.

“Nothing you need concern yourself with,” Fenris says. Though he has little planned at the moment, except to adhere to his regular regimen of squats, lunges, stretches, push-ups, once Varania has left the room.

“You should look for a job.”

“I have coin,” Fenris says. “I saved up while I was in Kirkwall. I am paying for this room.” There is more that’s unsaid. That he had once wasted a good portion of coin paying for Varania to travel to come meet him. That a larger part was wasted when he did not have time to fill more than one rucksack with gold, before fleeing the city.

“It is not the point. You are idle. Given to sloth.” The judgement drips with Varania’s every word.

It was the fashion by which Fenris lived in Kirkwall. Days spent with no more than time to sit in his mansion. To read, sleep, play cards, dance upon occasion. Interspersed with days dominated by his mercenary work – which often necessitated he go without sleep for forty eight hours. Even his time with Danarius, he thinks, was punctuated by an idleness that seemed unnatural to many other slaves. It could hardly be called restful, but he remembered hours upon hours where there was nothing to do but stand at Danarius’s side in silence, watching, listening, feeling the painful throb of his brands surge and retreat in waves.

He does not know why this is something Varania has chosen to moralise. Well, he does know why. A slave at work is a useful slave is a slave that won’t be disposed of. But Varania is not a slave anymore. He does not understand why this is the part of it she’s chosen to cling to.

“I will find some way to earn coin when it is necessary,” Fenris says.

Varania frowns, and it looks surprisingly like his own. “And what of _him_?” Varania flings her hand to the side.

Fenris does not need to look where Anders had curled up on the corner, wrapped tight in his feathered coat, and fallen to sleep. Does not want to look.

Varania is ranting. “He is worse than a human slave, idling when he knows it is _us_ that will be beaten harder for the task going incomplete. I will not work so a lazy shem might eat on my dime! Never again!” she says, like this is something she might have the power to prevent.

Fenris sighs. He has not given thought to how Anders might be eating. Upon reflection, it must be something Merrill has been seeing to, has probably dipped her hand into Fenris’s purse for. He can’t bring himself to care. “I’ll make sure it’s not your dime he eats on,” he agrees.

Varania does not seem satisfied at all. It looks for a second like she might turn to go. Surely she has a job to get to. But instead she takes a deep breath, and forces her voice to be soft and calm.

“Le- Fenris. Why is that shem here?”

In an instant, all the bitterness and defensiveness that Fenris should have felt hearing Varania disparage his laziness surges forth and pulls around him like a shield.

“Isabela,” Fenris says crisply.

Varania rolls her eyes and throws her hands up in frustration. The name means nothing to her, and Fenris knew it wouldn’t and had wanted it that way.

His sister doesn’t deserve the answer. And Fenris barely has one for himself. Isabela had stowed Anders away on her ship on the way out of Kirkwall and kicked him off the boat after Fenris and Merrill when they made it to Minrathous. And words were said about how he might be a necessary asset, so long as Fenris was looking to incite another revolution. But really Fenris had done it just because Isabela had told him to and, so long as Fenris was being honest with himself, it still went against his grain to refuse a direct command. Especially not one coming from Isabela, who he felt he owed for the time and love they had shared, at the very least.

He would have thought that Hawke and Isabela owed Anders, at the very least. Anders had wanted to die, had asked them to kill him, and both refused him. Fenris felt vaguely insulted on his behalf, that these people who claimed to be Anders’s friend had no such mercy in them. But Anders was on his own. Fenris was no friend of his, and if Anders wanted to die he could go ahead and plunge the blade in himself. Fenris would gladly curse him and wish the full wrath of the Maker on him for such a sin.

But that hasn’t happened so far, so Anders is just there, lying silently in the room like a heap of rags.

“Who is the shem?” Varania asks. “And who is Isabela?”

“Don’t you have any friends?” Fenris snaps. And it’s not an answer, although Varania doesn’t need to know that.

“I had friends.” Her voice is soft and sad.

“I suppose you stabbed them in the back too!”

“I was emancipated!” Varania snaps. “I couldn’t exactly visit Danarius’s estate to take tea with the old girls!”

Fenris is contrite in spite of himself.

“And then I moved to Alam. Then Quarinus. Then Minrathous,” Varania continues. “Friends do not survive those kinds of changes.”

There had once been eight of them, not counting the Mabari. Sometimes Donnic too. And Carver Hawke, briefly. Maybe they weren’t all friends, but Fenris thought they were something. Something more sturdy than the white clay walls of the Kirkwall Chantry. But Fenris had been wrong. Everyone had splintered off in their own directions, breaking apart the same way Kirkwall had. And now Fenris is left with the dregs – the mages nobody else wants.

“Sadly true. Friends do not last for people like us,” Fenris agrees. And he is thinking of slaves and fugitives and martyrs.

“Yet you did not come here alone. The same way you did not come to meet me at that tavern in Kirkwall alone.”

And he cannot blame Varania for disbelieving him, but he also doesn’t know how to explain he is nothing to be envious of. He can’t even begin to find the words, before he’s bowed over by the aching thrum of loss. He misses them terribly, had begun to miss them the moment Sebastian fled Kirkwall in his rage. Where is Hawke to guide him, and Isabela to touch him, and Aveline and Donnic to scold and praise him?

And here he was holding onto Anders and Merrill, like two tiny fragments of Kirkwall that would preserve the whole illusion. As if they too hadn’t been irrevocably changed by everything that had happened in the end.

His legs are off the wall, and he’s pulled his knees into his chest right where he’s lying. Threaded his hands over his face, silently pleading with himself to think of something else, anything else.

“Oh, will you stop it! Nobody wants to see your dramatics!” Varania snaps. For a moment she only sputters, then- “I don’t have time for this,” she finally decides. “I have a job to get to.”

==

In another life, Fenris might have been a soldier.

What had his position as Danarius’s bodyguard been, in fact, if not that of a glorified soldier? Danarius, like nearly all the magisters of Tevinter, had been expected to make a contribution to the war effort. And Fenris had stood by his side at war meetings, defended him against more than one Tallis, assisted in the interrogation of Qunari prisoners. Was that not the work of a soldier?

It is not quite the same though, Fenris understands. He had been more and less than a soldier – a living breathing science experiment, a pourer of fine wine, a shadow, a pet, a whore. But Fenris had been a strong and healthy body before he was any of those other things. Before he had even become Fenris.

Leto had been primed for it. And for all their differences, Leto had possessed the same inclination, athleticism, discipline. The discipline that keeps Fenris running through his training routine each day, even without a master watching over his shoulder. The discipline that lets Fenris stand steady and weather all manner of assault, without saying a word so long as silence stings just as painfully. Fenris takes pride in that part because, even if they are qualities that have been carefully groomed in him at Danarius’s behest, they are also qualities that have served him well as a free man in Kirkwall. (And because sometimes you have to take pride in who you are and have been, even if who that is is a slave.)

Leto would have been a soldier. Not the prized jewel of Danarius’s collection, but one of the many that Danarius had turned over to the state as either tax or donation, that had then been shipped off to the front. If Leto hadn’t won the tournament that gave Fenris his brands, this is what would have happened to him.

If Leto hadn’t won the tournament, he’d have been killed by the person that did.

In another life, Fenris might be dead.

The land routes out of Minrathous are not quite as well guarded as the sea routes – there being plenty of checkpoints littered along the Imperial Highway before the land borders of the Imperium (unless one wishes to travel through the unforgiving Anderfels, an unpopular prospect for most). But the northern road up the promontory to the military barracks expects limited travel – carefully catalogued shipments of slaves and other supplies, visitations by esteemed generals and tacticians and their families. And there is little place to hide along the road with only grass on either side, razed every so often so it might not grow too high.

The sun hasn’t yet risen when Fenris sneaks out the northern entrance of the city, and the rest of the morning is spent travelling as far off the road as he can, on the edge of the eastern cliffs. It is not the safest place to walk, with at least a fifteen metre fall down to a rocky, sandy strip of beach, barely wide enough for one to walk along single file. But Fenris is sure-footed, and at least here he might hide himself, ducking into places where the rocks are uneven and the cliff is starting to sag. Though he’s half convinced he might stumble into a paralysis glyph set for spies and surveyors doing exactly what he is doing now.

It is not a long walk, but it is made long by the care he must take manoeuvring around the cliff face, the time spent noting the rise and fall of the land as he travels, the way he must draw still every time someone passes along the main road, and the paranoia. He is probably already visible from the compound’s watchtower – a dark hooded figure stained with the bright white of lyrium.

The complex itself is large, almost overflowing off the side of the cliff. And when he reaches it, it is tall and looming and… well, it’s there.

Fenris sneaks closer. He’s perpendicular to the entrance of the fortress, and unnoticed by the guards until he’s past them and hidden himself in the shadow of the wall over the cliff.

He realises he hoped there would be an open yard, perhaps a vantage point where he might observe the soldier slaves training, or otherwise preforming their duties. But there is nothing to climb but the heights of the prison walls themselves, and nowhere to make himself voyeur to the prisoners, mirrors of the person he might have been.

 _They cannot be locked in there at all times_ , Fenris thinks. They must come out to run laps or preform their drills. It would not be a danger to let most of them breathe. The whole area is surrounded. Where would the soldier slaves escape to with the whole of the ocean on three sides, and the whole of Minrathous blocking them in from the south? And the punishment for deserters must be high indeed, and that’s only for the ones who would entertain the idea of paying it. If they are really who Fenris might have been, perhaps they would not even think of escaping.

And this is the biggest problem. They would be good allies to have. They’re powerful warriors. Well trained and well fed so that they could be strong when the Qunari came. The way Fenris was. But how is he meant to reach them, if they are like he was? Even beyond the danger and difficulties of attempting to slip into the compound, to establish a line of contact with the slaves inside, to develop a plan of attack- It had taken months for the Fog Warriors to get through to Fenris, and in the end they had paid for it with their lives. Fenris wasn’t that good. He wasn’t even a fraction as altruistic as the Fog Warriors had been, who had taken him in and treated him like a person just because he was lost and alone and it was right. Fenris needed the slaves inside to fight _his_ battles, for _his_ cause.

“You there-!” a voice shouts.

Fenris barely looks at the man – the view in his periphery is enough. It would do little good to charge him, or run the perimeter of the complex, so the only escape is-

Fenris scrambles down the cliff as fast as he can. He’s not the most talented climber – thinking of the way Isabela and Merrill had swung up on the sails and rafters of that giant ship, but he manages a controlled fall down the slant of dirt and rocks, until he must turn to the rockface in earnest and scramble down hand over hand. There’s shouting from above, and he’s still over five metres off the ground when a fireball comes hurtling down at him.

_Damn mages!_

It’s not a direct hit, and most of the magic that does find him absorbs into his lyrium markings, but it does succeed in knocking him down. There’s a dull thump, as he hits the rock and sand and his travelling cloak, caught alight in the blaze, extinguishes itself as it’s suffocated against the damp sand.

He’s rattled and bruised, and his skin is tender with the radiating heat of his brands, but still in one piece. And he thinks for a moment that it’s good he has a healer back in the room, even if he knows he won’t be working up the nerve to ask Anders for help.

What’s better is he seems to have fallen into a blind spot underneath the bulk of the cliff. If he keeps as close to the side of the cliff face as he can, it might disallow the mage at the top a clear view of him for a few hundred metres out along the coast. It might be enough cover to curate confusion, or disinterest, or a languid pace in the guardsman, that will allow Fenris the opportunity to get away.

His body aches, and he wants to just lay there. But even if nobody comes searching for him, it’s only a matter of time before the tide rises and drags him out to sea. In some places the salty water has already come up to cover the shallows completely.

So he forces himself up and, sticking as close to the cliff face as he can, lopes across the tiny strip of land back towards the city.

==

“Oh, this is where you are!”

Merrill doesn’t wait for an invitation. She unstraps Voracity from her back, props it gingerly against the pile of rubble, and sits down next to Fenris on the largest rock. She follows his eyes out to sea. But she can see Seheron no more than he can, and doubtless does not understand what his eyes are searching for.

“You look a bit peaky today,” she notes mildly. Which Fenris supposes is an interesting way of saying he’s bruised, singed, and soaking wet. He has an open cut on his face, and smells like the rancid garbage he’d waded through getting back into the city.

“Were you looking for me?” His voice sounds worn and garbled in his own ears, and he coughs.

“No,” Merrill chirps. “But I found you anyway.” She has preoccupied herself rummaging through a greasy brown paper bag. Breaks some kind of treat in her hands, and feeds herself.

Fenris’s nose wrinkles. “What is that?”

“Some type of turnover they have out at those stands,” Merrill answers. She waves half of a curried fish pasty in his face. “Would you like some?” she offers in a saccharine sweet voice.

“Ugh!” Fenris recoils from the smell. Recoils from Merrill, who takes sadistic pleasure in offering false pleasantries, and had not spent two months with him at sea to come out the other end not knowing how much he hates fish.

“Suit yourself,” Merrill sing songs, as she takes another bite of the pasty.

They sit in silence as she eats. Fenris wonders if the pasties are stolen. Merrill seems at times to have a loose understanding of the workings of a market, and claims forgetfulness as she takes what she likes and wanders away without paying. Although since there had been a Dalish merchant at Sundermount, Fenris suspects it’s only an act Merrill affects out of disrespect for certain shop purveyors.

Fenris searches for a neutral topic of conversation. There are surprisingly few to be found.

“Your language lessons?” he finally asks in Tevene.

“Are going very well, thank you,” Merrill responds in kind. And her words are a little broken, but less than he would have expected for only a week or two of classes. “You’ll have to forgive my mistakes. It took a while for me to learn the eccentricities of the common tongue as well.”

Fenris scoffs, because she sells herself short. The tragedy about Merrill is that she’s bright and brilliant, only everything she chooses to spend her genius on is foolishness and evil.

Except… he doesn’t know that he can say that of her current pursuits.

“What do you… _do_?” he asks.

“I beg your pardon?” Merrill asks and then, without waiting for clarification, continues. “I do the things I must to live, same as anyone.”

Fenris lets out half a laugh before he reminds himself not to find the humour in this. He’d be hard pressed to find anyone who lives quite like Merrill.

“You’ve all but appointed yourself the Hahren of our neighbourhood.” And Fenris hadn’t failed to notice the tree Merrill had planted in the vacant lot. It was small, a banyan instead of an oak. But the trunk had been painted, like a proper vhenadahl.

“I am First to Keeper Marethari of the Sabrae Clan,” Merrill says with equal parts weariness and determination, love and poison. “But I could do worse than being remembered as Hahren.”

Nearly each word in this response is evocative of a different disagreement they’ve had over the years. And Fenris struggles to navigate a response in the midst of burning green envy. But he’s saved from finding words when Merrill finally deigns to answer his original question.

“Many of them are like your sister,” she begins. “Well… not _like_ your sister,” she amends, and it’s only because Fenris has known Merrill so long that he recognises the way her nose scrunches in distaste. “But many are of the belief that if they master their magic, they may improve their lot in life.”

“They are not wrong,” Fenris points out. “This is Tevinter, land of mages.”

“They are elves in a land of humans, Fenris,” Merrill chastises. “As soon as it seems they might grab the advantage, the humans will change the rules on them.” She frowns. “But, no, I understand where you’re coming from,” she allows. “It is not a solution, but in the meantime it might land them a better job, or keep them or their families safe in a pinch, or ward them from spirits. It might even help them fight with us, if they choose to.”

Fenris says nothing.

“So most came to me to be learned in their magic, especially at first. We do simple things – how to breathe or move, so as to invite one’s power into their control instead of just suppressing it. How to chill and heat the skin, or a cup of water. How to wrap magic into the soil and sprout seeds in it.”

To teach that last one, Fenris knows, defies trade secret of Tevinter. Magical applications in agriculture is a highly coveted brand of magic – and texts on its practices and technique are often reserved for use at specific estates and plantations. Its secrets are guarded nearly as jealously as the finer arts of magical healing, or the more gruesome applications of-

“Do you teach them blood magic too?” Fenris spits, and he’s not sure why he’s bringing up this old argument.

“Not yet,” Merrill says lightly. “I will when there is someone with the inclination and talent.” And when Fenris has nothing to offer this except a scowl, she braves on. “It’s not all that I’m teaching them. I’m showing them to hunt, scavenge for herbs, other such things. Things that everyone could do.”

“You realise the flora and fauna here are nothing like what you’ve seen in Kirkwall?” Fenris grouses, thinking of Kirkwall’s inclimate squalls, compared to the hot monsoons here in the tropics.

Merrill fixes him with a look of condescension that makes him feel utterly stupid. “Of course,” she tisks. “The plants in Kirkwall also varied from those in Ferelden, and those in Nevarra. Do you think any two places might be completely the same? One of the first things I did was seek out those with knowledge in this discipline.” Merrill blinks and brightens. “Have you seen all the birds here, Fenris. They are so colourful – I’ve seen such bright oranges and greens. Why have you never mentioned them?”

“I-” Fenris feels himself colour. Because in all the time he’s been here, he thinks he’s never had the patience or good humour to watch the birds. “To what end is any of this?” he persists.

“Well, we’ll need to be ready,” Merrill says plainly. “For the day we gather all of them – the slaves and the servants – and walk away.”

Fenris is reminded of a conversation from long ago – _You might as well say, If they flew into the sky, they could live in the clouds._ He wants to explain to Merrill that even if it were as easy as standing up and walking away, that there is no place to go for a hundred miles. Minrathous is not Kirkwall, and Kirkwall…

Kirkwall was a port city, a _slaver_ city. And so is Minrathous, but Minrathous is also so much more. Kirkwall was little else.

Kirkwall had sold the enchantments made by the growing number of Tranquil in the Gallows, and there had been a smattering of privately owned mines that produced ore and gems and, subsequently, craft. But Kirkwall made most of its money on tariffs and docking fees for the passing sea traffic, and half the city was perpetually out of work because there was no _real_ industry in Kirkwall. Only a growing criminal underbelly, that then necessitated a growing patrol of law enforcement, until both were bloated and fat leeching off whatever had once been good about the place.

In such a place, surrounded by rocky mountains and arid land which nobody had any claim to, nor wished any claim to- it did not matter if the Dalish roamed or hunted or pulled up herbs, or even made flower crowns and frolicked.

But Minrathous is a bustling centre of production. It is filled with fisheries and granaries and factories – producing food and drink and cloth to fuel the endless tide of trade with the Dwarven Subterania. Which in turn provided weapons and enchantments to fuel the endless war with the Qunari, for which more bodies were always needed. And even if Minrathous would somehow overlook an exodus of its elvhen undercaste, so desperately needed to fuel its endless demand for production, where would they flee? For hundreds of miles outside the city proper, land has been allotted into plantations and estates – meticulously controlled by the magisters and filled with slaves.

There is no place here for Merrill, and whoever else she has roped into her schemes, to do whatever Dalish thing she has in mind. There is no room to even _be_ Dalish, here in Tevinter.

But Merrill has always made it clear she is willing to make her own mistakes. And, maybe, just a little, Fenris doesn’t want to be her naysayer. If she succeeded, he would only look the fool. And if she failed, it would be a failure for him as well. Forewarning her would not lessen the sting.

Therefore, it is doubly irritating that Merrill reads into the words he has decided to leave unspoken, as if they were written plainly on his face.

“I know you spent your adolescence surrounded by humans, Fenris,” she chides. “But I will remind you – you are not one of them. You do not need to behave the way they do. You have come here to accomplish something, and you will accomplish it. You will outlive all of them – Hawke, Isabela, whatever part of Anders that is still human, and every magister you have met to date.” Her eyes are glassy and sad, and impossibly wide. And her voice turns soft. “You know we are lost causes, right, Fenris? It is too late for us who are here now – for every slave, Circle mage, every last one of the Dalish. The only people we can save, the only ones we struggle for, are those who haven’t been born yet. You do not need to rush to build and destroy everything in one day, like if you do it quickly enough you might rewrite your history, or make your end come any faster. Plans and intentions take time to sow. You can be patient, Fenris.”

There are so many things wrong with her argument, Fenris barely knows where to start. Does she really think slaves remotely comparable to southern mages or the Dalish? Does she see no issue with dispensing wisdom from a culture made completely obsolete by human proactivity and modernity? But the thing that stands out to him most is the blatant hypocrisy. Like she had ever been patient with her mirror. And perhaps more immediately-

“You- You- I’m not the one that sounds like a human!” Fenris accuses. “You’re just like them! Every ‘forward-thinker’ who believes they have it figured out! _Slavery is wrong, but it’s not the time for rebellion. Not with the state of production as it is now. Not with the war with the Qun. Not with Orlais scheming. Change will come in its own time. We’re not ready yet._ ” Fenris mocks. “If not now, when?! You say we struggle on behalf of those who haven’t been born yet. But what of the people born tomorrow?! The only way we can save them is if we do something today!”

He’s breathing heavily, cursing how temperamental he’s been recently, and is only more enraged when Merrill says nothing. “Well?!” he prompts.

“Nothing.” Merrill tucks a hand under her chin and grins at him smugly. “I concede.”

“You concede?” Fenris says, baffled. He’d never known Merrill to do such a thing.

“I concede,” she agrees. “Anders told me more or less the same thing when I advised him against getting swept up in Justice’s impatience. If the two of you are agreeing on something, it must be worth taking under consideration.”

Fenris sucks the air through his teeth, and recoils from the sour taste.

Merrill is laughing at him.

“We were in agreement that your accursed blood magic would be the bloody death of everything you cared about as well,” Fenris snarls.

If it hurts Merrill, she refuses to let him see it. Nothing like the way she had sobbed the entire way back from Sundermount, and curled in on herself every time either of them threw salt at the wound. It gives Fenris no pleasure to see how guarded she has become.

“And I took that under consideration, too,” Merrill says. But she reaches for Voracity, her demon staff, and leans it against her knee. Making it clear, whatever she’s contemplated, she has made her decision.

==

“We need bread,” Varania says. And Fenris thinks it a poor attempt at idle conversation, until Varania rubs the sleeve of her left arm in a nervous gesture, and adds, “Accompany me.”

There are many reasons an elvhen woman might not want to travel alone to the market so close to dusk, but Fenris decides to go with the interpretation that is most personal – it seems like the kind of thing an elder brother should do for a sister.

Varania is patient as he straps his sword to his back and finds something with sleeves, so his arms are covered at least. When he follows her out into the hallway, Varania pauses and seems to consider something, before she stubbornly links her arm in his.

It stings a little – her arm held so rigidly against his brands. But the pain only a little thing, compared to the gravity of the gesture and the affection is stirs in him.

It’s awkward moving through the too narrow hallway and down the too narrow stairs, arm-in-arm and side-by-side like this. But Varania seems more determined to not let go the more ridiculous and uncomfortable it becomes, and Fenris feels a little bit lighter, knowing he’s not the only one.

“Have we done this before?” he asks, as they’re practically walking sideways down the stairs, Varania in the lead.

“Go to the market together?” Varania asks. “Hardly. We weren’t exactly allowed money when we were both slaves.”

He hadn’t meant it like that, of course. Had they linked arms like this before? He can’t remember that. But there must have been times they walked together, and shared these casual familial acts of closeness. And the more he considered, the more he knew there were.

Varania seems to realise her answer was curt, and her voice is softer as she continues. “How much do you remember? About before?”

It’s a question he might have bristled at, another time. But she is so clearly trying right now, and he can believe she’s asking simply because she doesn’t know and wants to understand. His muddled memories must be confusing for her too.

“I remember parts,” Fenris says. “It’s… complicated. Sometimes I’ll find myself with a question and be surprised to find I already know the answer. But sometimes it feels like those answers, those memories, belong to someone else.”

Varania bites her lip, and doesn’t look back at him as she nods. “I can’t imagine,” she says. “But I think that too sometimes. So many things have happened, it sometimes feels like the life I lived at that time belonged to someone else.”

Fenris surprises himself by not taking it personally. Varania may not have lost her memories. But even the Fenris he was now felt like a different person, compared to the Fenris that had faithfully and unquestioningly served Danarius. People did not stay stagnant.

“Even if we didn’t used to go the market together back then, it’s something we can do now,” he offers. And he hopes he doesn’t sound as hesitant and fragile as he feels. He resolves not to emote even if she laughs, or pushes him away.

But instead Varania steels herself with a deep breath, and exhales a soft, “Yes.”

Her arm is wrapped more loosely around his now, less stiff and more natural. And when they reach the downstairs landing and she lets go to fiddle with the door, Fenris isn’t so worried about their ability to reinitiate that casual intimacy, now that they’ve let go.

Fenris steps ahead onto the street and waits as Varania finds her key. She’s a stickler for locking the front door of their building when she leaves. Even though nobody else in their room, let alone the building at large, is as stringent with it as her. Fenris always comes back to find the door unlocked. But even though Fenris isn’t sure he understands the quirk, he’s willing to accept she’s picked up the habit for her own reasons.

She turns to catch back up with him, taking three long strides down the landing. And then her foot catches, and she trips on the ankle of the street sweeper that is bent over the doorstep.

Before Fenris can rush forward, Varania catches herself and stumbles back onto the soles her shoes, saved from a nasty fall. But then Varania frowns ever so slightly. She turns, rears up a still wobbly foot and, with a ferocious kick, plants the toe of her shoe into the sweep’s thigh. The sweeper woman gapes silently for air, and then scrambles away.

Fenris himself is a man too well accustomed to violence to be truly disturbed by it. He’d inflicted it on others nearly as often as it had been inflicted upon himself. And what of it Hawke hadn’t seen to inure him to personally, Fenris had observed in every society he’d ever chanced to look at. Even among the merchants and workers in the Free Marches – free men all of them – it was not uncommon to see kicked apprentices, beaten day labourers, and strikes and riots that brought the Hightown Market to reckon.

So he is not really bothered by Varania lashing out, so much as the docility and servitude with which the street sweeper accepts it. He feels the nausea in his stomach churn as he watches the nameless woman bow her head and cower and continue with her duties like they had never been disrupted. And it makes him more nauseous to realise the one he is angry with is this cowering portrait of servitude, and not the self-righteous sister who struck the blow.

He pours all his energy into redirecting his rage to the right target.

“How could you do this?!” he hisses at Varania, who smooths her dress with an absent look.

“Do what?” Varania walks up to his side, and steps a bit too close into his personal space.

Fenris glares. He is not sure of much with Varania, but he is sure she is not _this_ stupid.

Varania rolls her eyes and gives an annoyed, yet still affectionate, huff. “Do not create a scene over nothing.”

Her affection, which only a moment ago was such a blessing, is now blisteringly offensive. “It is not _nothing_!” he hisses. “You struck that girl for nothing but chancing to be in your way!”

“She tripped me,” Varania retorts. “And she is a slave. Servus Publicus.”

There are many things Fenris could say, but so many of them will mean nothing to Varania, and what flies out of his mouth is: “She is owned by the state? Then she is not _your_ slave to beat!”

Varania does startle back at that. But then she digs her heels in and presses on with renewed conviction, and the cost it took to say those words is not even worth it in the end.

“And your point, Fenris? That I am not a full citizen?! That it is not my right?!” she challenges. “I know it and I know it better than you!”

And this was not his point, not at all. And he resists the urge to drop his head into his hands and curl away from Varania because this whole place is poison. And it is eating away at his ideals and convictions more surely than lye to rust.

“It is not my right, but I will take it anyhow,” Varania says. “You are a fool if you think anyone cares enough to stop me.”

 _I care_ , Fenris thinks.

The thought is directed at Varania more than the sweeper woman, though he wishes it wasn’t. Just not as much as he wishes he hadn’t squandered that companionable moment, which had only lasted the brief moment it took to walk to the entrance of their apartment building. If he was less angry maybe, less raw- Maybe he could state his mind calmly, without losing himself in the frantic need to shut Varania’s cruelty down. Maybe he could be the kind of person that chose to change people’s hearts with soft words and encouragement. Maybe he still can. Maybe he can offer Varania his arm again, and have that familial connection that he deeply, painfully, enviously covets.

He reaches for her, only to have her flinch horrifically and recoil backwards. It strikes him that she’s caught off guard by her reaction as much as he is. She would not have voluntarily moved with so little grace, or let him see the raw fear on her face.

Still, she recovers quicker. “Don’t touch me!” she snaps. “Just- Go away. I’ll go to the market myself.” She’s already turning away. “I don’t need an escort. I made do fine without, the last fourteen years. I don’t need you. Not if all you’re going to do is criticise every little thing I do.”

Fenris is not quite so given to despair that he failed to feel angry. _Beating a slave was such a little thing to her, was it? Not even worthy of criticism?_ But Varania is already gone, and the sweeper woman has moved on. And he won’t chase after them when he had no words.

He paces angrily for a moment, before trying the door and recalling Varania had locked it. And then he spends another few minutes pacing and fuming until another tenant, home from a long day, chances by to unlock the door. Fenris brushes past, storming upstairs back up to the room, and slams the door.

He’s overcome with the urge to break something- but he can not break the table, or its makeshift chairs, or the halla statue. They are Merrill’s. And the washbasin and kettle belong to Varania. And the furnace belongs to everyone, or maybe to the absent landlord. And there is nothing in this room that is his to break, except for himself.

So Fenris pounds his fist against the wall, where he knows there’s a wooden beam on the other side to keep the plaster from crumbling, and howls. Either from the frustration, or just from the pain in his hand.

He realises abruptly he is not alone in this room. He snaps his head around, and finds the mage just as Anders’s eyes fall away from him and down to the floor.

What was it the mage had called him _– a wild dog_? Fenris sure wasn’t doing much to prove him wrong.

But who is the mage to judge – hiding in the corner, listening in as Fenris pours his heart into argument after conversation after argument with Varania?! What gives him the right to sit by and watch Fenris at his most vulnerable, going stir-crazy in a room full of mages and broken shards of memory and family, and judge him for it? How is he allowed to subsist on Isabela and Merrill’s goodwill as he waits, like a coilt snake, for the right moment to strike?

“Who do you think you are?” Fenris is upon Anders in an instant. “O’ high and mighty mage,” he sneers, “does it please you to see us like this – fighting like beasts trapped in a pit? You are here in the Imperium, after so long. Is it everything you’ve dreamed?”

He is glaring at Anders, trying to catch his eye. But they are trained resolutely on the floor.

“Do you think it pleases me to see you like this?” Fenris says, picking up momentum. “Hawke and Isabela spared your miserable life. Is this what you intend to do with it? Do you think you will make anyone happy like this? Moping around like you were the one most hurt by what you yourself caused? Was all your conviction only talk?! Coward! _Mage_!”

When Anders doesn’t respond to this either, Fenris hisses a breath through his teeth and stomps his heel sharply into the mage’s crossed legs.

He wants the mage to retaliate, filled with his usual self righteous anger. Fenris even hopes, absurd as it is, that the mage’s demon will jump to his defence. To set Fenris alight in its wrath, and burn this whole city to the ground with him. But it is an absurd thought. The demon – (Justice, his name is Justice, and Fenris hates that his treacherous brain can’t help but provide the name) – has never appeared for him. Aside from that one treacherous night in the Fade, exchanging one-sided introductions, Justice has never spoken to him. Once, to startling effect, Justice surfaced to tell Varric to mind himself. But in all Fenris’s terrible, cruel, heated conflicts with Anders, the demon has never stepped in.

This moment does not prove to be the exception. There is simply no justice in the world for people like Fenris. Moreso when, instead of all the many things that the mage could do, he simply accepts the kick, cowers away out of reach, and continues his business. Ignoring Fenris as if it had never been disrupted.

It is not the same, Fenris thinks. Anders is not a slave. And Fenris is not his sister. But he is ashamed, and the bitter taste of it overwhelms him completely.

All the fight leaves him in an instant. And, once it’s gone, there is nothing left but exhaustion. He looks away from Anders, and slinks to his bedroll on the opposite side of the room, and collapses face down.

He can not- will not- pretend what he is doing is right.

He should simply ignore the abomination, as wholly and completely as Anders is ignoring him. He must, because if this is the alternative… _He cannot. He cannot._ Fenris breathes his promises to the floor.

==

There must be channels for this sort of thing. Organised routes out of the Imperium designed to help get slaves away from the Magisters and their hunters.

Organisation. Planning. Assurance.

They are things that Fenris is sure he didn’t have on his first go around. If there was an Underground movement against the Magisters, Fenris hadn’t been aware of it when he’d made his escape.

He’d known so little, and learned it all so fast. His actions hadn’t been that of someone keen and savvy and educated in the making of such decisions. They’d been the actions of a desperate man. There had been nothing to lose, no cognisant worry for the life he didn’t fully consider his yet, just the knowledge that he couldn’t – not wouldn’t, _couldn’t –_ return to Danarius.

It had been something like instinct that had him cut his way through the jungle and stow away on a ship to the mainland. He’d ended up in Asariel.

Isabela had told him she knew a shipmaster that smuggled mages out of the Antiva circle and into Tevinter. (Isabela had also told him there was as good a chance as any he was only a slaver the specialised in mage slaves. Fenris does his best to ignore this part.) So it stands to reason there are also shipmasters that smuggle slaves out of Tevinter and into Antiva and other such places.

But the Fenris back then had spent nearly a week huddled in the hull, miserable and hungry and sick to his stomach. And had then found himself needing to drive his sword through a disturbingly youthful cabin boy in order to escape back on land. The Fenris back then had not wanted to entertain the thought of an even longer ship voyage out of the Imperium.

He had gone overland as best he could. He was not much of a pickpocket, so he cornered people in alleys – not dwarves, not mages, nobody who he thought would be missed. He cut them open trying to get at their purses, and disposed of the bodies such that hopefully nobody would notice in the time it took him to move on. Eventually, he had a whole purse full, and it was known that dwarves cared very much about gold, and very little about the politics of surfacers.

And they’d helped him. Maybe because Fenris had only ever asked for help when he could do so hiding behind a sword and a bag of coin. Maybe because he’d paid them whatever they’d asked, too ashamed to let on he had no understanding of the numbers minted onto the coins. He hadn’t cared if he ended up handing over the entirety of a purse only to be referred to someone who would only ask for more gold. Or only to buy someone’s silence. Even if they were only taking advantage of a slave that was so desperate he’d pay any price, they had helped. They arranged him passage in merchant caravans, stays in backwater inns, and forged travel papers. And, in the end, he made past the Imperium, and then Nevarra, and had been referred to a dwarf named Anso. Who referred him to a Dog Lord named Hawke. And even now Fenris could not think the name without tapping a deep vein of affection and respect.

Where he could have been sold out, he had instead found the right people at the right time. The long and short of it was, as much as Fenris had made his own luck, he’d also been terribly lucky.

Looking at the dwarven quarter of town, where he once saw calculated risks and hidden opportunity, now he just sees people – ones who may or may not betray him like any other. It seems obvious now, that his old view of dwarves as convenient receptacles for greed, vapid neutrality, and far too much facial hair, had been a premature assessment to say the least. But for all that he is more knowledgable for having met Anso and Varric and Bodahn and Sandal, if anything he knows less about how to recreate the miracle of his escape in others.

He’d never asked those who helped him, nearly a decade ago, if they had dealt with any other escaped slaves. He’d rarely even asked their names, or tried to forget them as soon as he heard them. It had seemed safer at the time. Now they are only the names of contacts he can’t relocate.

It’s made worse by the fact that this area of the town is swarming with state police. Where wealth collects, they follow to protect it.

Fenris lingers in spite of it, pretending to admire the stonework, gems, even veins of lyrium that make the walls of the embassy. But he’s already ducked away and hid himself half a dozen times, any dwarf he might have once approached is suspicious for their proximity to symbols of institutionalised power. It’s impossible to tell how much it would cost to draw into question their loyalty to Minrathous, when it’s the Minrathous elite that protect them.

Eventually Fenris gives up this course. Everything is too risky, now that he is someone and has himself to lose.

For as much as Fenris will never truly be a slave again. He probably still is one on paper. He does not know who Danarius’s next of kin is – to his knowledge the man left no children, and Hadriana would have been Fenris’s second guess if she hadn’t beaten Danarius to the grave.

In some filing cabinet somewhere, there is a declaration that Fenris is the missing property of some green Magister pup, or else the missing property of the state which, if anything, is worse. The last thing Fenris needs is to give anyone a reason to dig this declaration up.

…

He returns to the room to find Merrill sitting on Anders’s right thigh, and rubbing a jar of ointment onto his face and bared shoulders. His skin is bright red and blistered.

Fenris catches an edge of a smile on each of their faces, gone as soon as he can perceive it. Any whispers they might have been sharing cut off sharply. And Merrill’s ears droop downward self-consciously, and she pulls her knees up further into her chest.

Fenris squints at them critically, before he shoves his cloak and breastplate and sword onto the floor, and goes for the kettle, still full with water.

He’s fussing with the flint and the furnace, when Merrill approaches him.

“It’s just he’s just so very pale,” Merrill begins. “Nothing like you. Or Varania. Or even me. I mean, I’m pale, but I don’t turn into a beetroot when I’ve stayed out in the heat too long. And the sun is so very hot here, isn’t it Fenris? You never mentioned that in your stories, although I guess maybe I should have known. Do you ever think-”

“I did not ask for an explanation,” Fenris cuts her off, unwilling to wonder at the reasons for her defensiveness.

The witch sulks. “I know,” she says. “It just might be nice if you did.”

They are silent for a moment, and then Merrill begins to fuss with the burlap sack sitting next to the furnace. Fenris glances over at the mage, who is still sitting slumped on the floor, unmoved from where Merrill had left him and as useless as ever. He looks at Merrill’s hands, where she smeared the ointment on her palms. They are littered with the scars of pricks and cuts from where she’d bled herself out. And Fenris pities Anders a little bit, for having lost sight of himself enough to let those hands touch him. But there is something else turning over in his gut and knotting his stomach, and Fenris does his best to tune it out.

“Why is he even sunburnt?” Fenris asks. “I’ve only once seen him come or go from this room.”

“Well, he wouldn’t let you see, would he?” Merrill says lightly, as she sorts through the sack and pulls out some yams to set over the furnace.

Before Fenris can settle on how disturbing this implication is, Merrill continues.

“I’m not his keeper, Fenris, so I can’t say where he goes all the time. But I know he’s been to the Imperial Chantry for service.”

Fenris grimaces. “What for?” he sneers. “I suppose I can guess. It must be nice for him to hear about how magic is a divine right that makes him so much better than the rest of us.”

Merrill doesn’t seem to catch his sarcasm. “Oh, you know how shemlen love to hear their stories about the Maker.”

“You realise most elves here are Andrastian too?” Fenris presses, but Merrill waves him off dismissively.

“I suppose it must be nice for Anders to enjoy such stories without being lectured on the evils of magic.”

“You say that like that’s all it is.”

“Isn’t it?” Merrill asks.

“He already idealises this place and its people far too much. Who is to say he won’t side with the magisters against us?” And that foolish part of Fenris hopes again that Anders will spring up off the floor and defend his own character.

Fenris lives to be disappointed.

“That doesn’t sound much like him.” Merrill scrunches her nose. “And no matter what he sees wandering around the city, he comes home here to the alienage in the evening. He can not be blind to what is happening here, amongst his people.”

Fenris is not so sure though. They all can betray him, and he wouldn’t put it past Varania, but Anders is the only one that might be able to get away with it – the one true wild card among them. Merrill, like Varania, for all that she is a mage, is still an elf, and can not be more than she is. Without a sponsor from a high ranking magister, she will never be taken for more than inconsequential Liberati. And such a sponsorship is unlikely to ever come. Merrill is a blood mage, and reckless and dangerous in her naiveté. But Fenris has no doubt that the Minrathous elite, who have no soft-hearted ideals about not sacrificing the innocent, would eat Merrill alive.

Anders could be anything though. He stands out here, in the not-alienage, where the elvhen would try and fail to place him or explain his presence. He has no travel papers or citizenship, same as the rest of them, and could easily be captured and taken as a slave. But he was a human and a mage, and could just as easily try to pass himself among the Laetans, if he chose. And he had a reputation – Darktown Healer, Reckoner of Kirkwall, Most Wanted Man in Thedas. If Anders decided not to hide himself, he might be taken for a political prisoner and ransomed to Orlais for punishment. Or he might catch the eye and be taken in by some foolhardy, idealist magister, one who thought himself very philanthropic and generous in his support of the southern mages, even as he crushed slaves beneath his sandals.

Yes, Anders could be anyone here, and that that decision might be made by nobody in this room made it only the worse.

Fenris watches Merrill critically. She always seems so cheery and unworried, even though Fenris’s mind is burdened with nothing but paranoia.

“Don’t you ever worry?” Fenris says, frustration pulling on his tone in spite of himself.

“Of course,” Merrill retorts. “About all kinds of things. What if Isabela’s ship hits a storm? What if Hawke and Carver won’t stop fighting amongst themselves? What if Varric drops another pot of ink all over his drafts? What if the roof starts leaking? Do you think halla enter the Fade when they dream, Fenris? If they do, do you think they remember it the way us mages do? Is it more sad if they do, or they don’t? It worries me that I don’t know the answer.”

“No, of leaving this room,” Fenris says sharply. Because the only thing more important that cutting off Merrill’s nonsense, is cutting off worries about Isabela and Hawke and Varric when they are not here and there is nothing Fenris can do for them.

“Am I afraid of leaving this room?” Merrill asks, and when Fenris makes not objections to her interpretation, she responds. “No, not really.”

Fenris gives a frustrated huff. “You are a fool not to be. There are patrols outside this room. Being a mage is not enough to save you. They will not hesitate to collar their own kind.”

“I was an apostate mage in Kirkwall for seven years, Fenris.” Merrill frowns at her yams. “This is hardly my first experience slinking around and dodging guards. I know how to handle myself.”

“Then what will you do when you are cornered, and the state police are demanding to see your papers, if you don’t wish to be shackled.”

“When they…” She begins to repeat his words, and then abruptly trails off. Merrill’s ears droop, and then turn up sharply. “Oh, well, that’s happened already. And it worked itself out.”

“What?!” Fenris demands, scandalised. “What did you do to get out of it?!”

“I just told them I forgot my papers at home that day.” Merrill is staring intently at her hands and picking at her nails anxiously.

“And they just accepted the excuse?” Fenris says, eyes narrowing suspiciously. Maybe he’s underestimated just how persuasive Merrill’s innocent-and-empty-headed act is to most people. Or maybe- “Did they… do something to you?”

“Oh, Fenris, they didn’t touch me. Everything was fine. You’d be surprised at how easy it is to make people see what they already want to believe.” She’s talking so quickly, Fernis is not sure she’s breathing. “Anyhow, if you worry much more than you already do, your face is just going to sprout more premature wrinkles.” Merrill stands up suddenly. “Why don’t I go fill Varania’s washbasin? I was thinking, Fenris, that you’re always bathing down by the spigot in the basement. And it’s terribly cold, and you’re the only one of us who can’t heat water by yourself. How awful. Though we really should try some of the public bathhouses, since we’re here in Tevinter anyhow and they’re so popular. But in the meantime I bet I can bring a washrag and some warm water up for you and you’ll feel so much better. You’ll see.”

He frowns at her, but pretty soon she’s out the door. And it’s all very suspicious, but the part of his brain dedicated to his own self-preservation shuts it out. And Merrill has left him with the kettle and the yams to look after. And, to be truthful, the cold baths have been irritating his brands.

==

Varania losing her job is an inevitability, rather than a likelihood. The day the warehouse matches and exceeds their order for hemp fabric, the entire operation is shut down and everyone inside summarily dismissed.

It would have been a small dent in Fenris’s day, but it seems to loom large and impossible for Varania. Despite the fact that she never wanted the job to begin with and had always planned to leave it for something better.

It starts small, but the criticisms begin to roll in. Fenris is scuffing the wood floors with his toenails, eating a mango too sloppily, and frowning a little too obviously (which is odd, since as far as Fenris is aware, he isn’t frowning at all). And there is nothing, even on this most idle of days that he can do correctly.

“Would you stop tapping your fingers against the table like that already?!” Varania says waspishly. “It’s distracting.”

Fenris raises his hand, not even aware of where it rested against the table. He folds it on his lap, but what he says is, “It seems to me like a distraction might not be the worst thing for you right now.”

“You would think that,” Varania huffs. “Since you do nothing but let yourself be pulled about by idle distractions.”

“Look, if you have something to say, then say it,” Fenris says. “You lost your job.” He decides they might as well address the elephant in the room instead of tiptoeing around it. “Why are you acting as if this is my fault?”

When Varania explodes this time, it is in their native language. “ _It is your fault!_ _None of this would be happening if not for you!_ ”

“ _You’re blaming me for bargaining your freedom_ ,” Fenris scoffed. “ _You’re mad_.”

“ _There was a time in my life I never had to worry about where I’d be working tomorrow! Where I wasn’t being tossed around from one place to the next like an unwanted piece of trash! Where everything was set, and safe, and I knew I’d be fed at midday, and that I wouldn’t be sitting alone when it happened!_ ”

“ _And that’s my fault?_ ” Fenris says incredulously. “ _You don’t think that had anything to do with the fact that our mother was with you at the time?_ ”

“ _She would still be alive if you hadn’t-_ ”

“ _You said she caught consumption!_ ” Fenris snarled. “ _If she had done so as a slave, she wouldn’t have lasted longer than a fortnight before Danarius bled her out!_ ”

“ _She wouldn’t have caught it if we’d stayed at his estate!_ ”

“ _You don’t know that,_ ” Fenris warned.

“I _don’t know that?!_ ” Varania repeated. “ _You don’t know that! You don’t know anything! You weren’t_ there _!_ ” Fenris can see tears beading in the corners of her eyes, and she continues more quietly. “ _There was a time in my life I never had to worry about how I’d be living tomorrow. All of those decisions were already made. I wish- I wish-_ ” She breathes irregularly, in sharp little gasps that cut off her own words. “ _I wish none of this had happened. I wish you’d never bargained for us. All your gifts are poison. I wish- I wish-_ ”

Fenris wishes their mother was still alive too. But he also knows Varania is remembering someone more clear, more personal, than his fragmented memories can give him. But is that better? Is Varania’s pain more justified, because she knows who she is missing? As opposed to Fenris, who only knows the gaping absence their mother had been left behind? If that’s anyone’s fault, he thinks, it’s Danarius’s for having inadvertently engineered a tragedy!

“ _You have had jobs you’ve left before,_ ” Fenris says. And it’s a guess, but a safe one to make. “ _Jobs where you were not allowed to lunch, or use the toilet. Where bosses harassed you. Or where dangerous magic w_ _as_ _being used, and another worker ended up dead. You’ve had jobs you needed to disappear from. And when you did disappear, nobody came to drag you back._ ”

“ _I-_ ” Varania starts, but she shuts her mouth soon enough. He’s caught her. She purses her lips and crosses her arms over her chest defensively.

“ _Your experiences as a Liberati might be worse than those you had as a slave. But when things were at their worst, you were empowered to leave and search elsewhere for you livelihood._ That _-_ ” Fenris spits, “ _that is what I gave you. It is your privilege as a free woman. Something I might remind you not everyone has._ ”

“You are utterly impossible and sanctimonious,” Varania snarls. The sudden switch to Tevene makes her sound prim.

She then exercises her right as a free woman and leaves the room.

Fenris wants to punch the wall again. But the last time he did it didn’t even make him feel any better, and then he’d taken things out on Anders unfairly. And looked the fool. And Merrill and Varania had to field some embarrassing questions about just who was causing a racket in their room and was everything okay. So Fenris holds himself back valiantly and tells himself to think it through.

But the more he rationalises, the worse it becomes.

Fenris is no fool, no matter what else he is, and no lack of proper education would keep him from seeing the truth of the situation. As infuriating as Varania is, this is not her fault, not really. The magisters, the whole of Tevinter society, have colluded to make the lives of the elvhen Liberati as miserable as possible – to keep them impoverished and uncertain of their futures, uncertain of even the source of their next meal. It convinces the magisters of the benevolence of owning people – at least those under their thumb are provided for. It convinces slaves that freedom is not something worth having. It even, at times, convinces Liberati to sell themselves back into slavery, though not often enough to belie the truth of the situation.

Varania is just some obnoxious symptom, one that could not be alleviated unless he found a solution to the real problem. Varania is only a symptom. And also his sister.

He paces the room, and decides to go through his bag for something to read. But Merrill is lying down and watching him. When he glances to her, she refuses to avert her eyes, and it’s becoming harder and harder to ignore and-

“What?” he finally asks. He crosses his arms and stands over her.

Merrill stretches in her bedroll. She turns to her side, and looks up at him from where she’s cradled her head against her arm. It’s lithe movement, catlike, and oddly sensual. Fenris had been lucky enough to avoid walking in on Merrill and Isabela in the act, but he’d found them once in one of their morning-afters. He’s reminded vividly of the way Merrill had curled herself around Isabela’s back in her sleep. The lazy way Merrill’s arms wrapped around so her fingers brushed Isabela’s forearm.

“Have I mentioned,” Merrill starts solicitously, “that I don’t really like it here?”

“Yes,” Fenris says.

“And have I mentioned,” Merrill continues, “that I don’t really like your sister?”

Fenris has no interest in Merrill’s petty dissatisfactions, when his own have gone so unaddressed and unresolved.

“It is a wonder why you remain here,” Fenris quips. “Seeing as you dislike both this place and everyone in it.”

“That’s not true,” Merrill says. And Fenris has already started to think better of his words. He doesn’t really understand Merrill’s relationship with the abomination – whether she dislikes Anders or not. They have never been particularly kind to one another, but Merrill had been the one, the only one really, to say so clearly and plainly that last day in Kirkwall that Anders should live.

So Fenris is caught completely off-guard when the next words that fall out of Merrill’s mouth are: “I like you.”

 _Well, I don’t like you_ , Fenris wants to snap. But the words dry in his mouth and his ears flutter and there’s the keen sense of relief that someone is managing to do more than tolerate him, that he is _liked_. And he might not have any of the same affection for her, but there is a startling surge of self consciousness and he knows he’d be ungracious to say so because Merrill is not the one who needs him. And she’s the only one here who has her act together. She’s doing his work for him, better than he could have. And she has always been smarter and brighter and better than him, with all the luxuries of a family and childhood and identity he had never been afforded. And it was no wonder Isabela had liked her so much. She’s _kind_. Even when she’s sharp and cutting, she’s unflinchingly, infuriatingly kind.

And he wonders what kind of person he is, to not be endeared by that. To find her so miserably and horribly intolerable.

“No, you don’t,” Fenris says gruffly, because it’s the easiest thing to say. And when she, quite predictably, insists that she does, he closes his ears to it.

He exercises his right as a free man and leaves the room.

==

“You’re a very silly man, you know?” Isabela had said. “Trying to shave your head in a sliver of mirror that small.”

Fenris frowned and lowered his hands, propping his elbows against his bent knees. Isabela didn’t wait before slipping the razor away from him.

“We don’t exactly have any other mirrors laying around,” Fenris protested weakly.

“We have at least one other mirror,” Isabela disagreed. “But I understand you’re probably looking for something less demonic and evil and sexy.”

“You’re calling the mirror sexy, now?” Fenris snorted. “And here I wondered how you managed to seduce the witch.”

“It wasn’t that. And I’ll never tell,” Isabela said solemnly. She sat next to him on the crate, and then slowly swung her hips into his until she bumped him off of it. When he was on the floor, she straddled her legs, so he was sitting between them, and leaned over his scalp with the razor. “So, the whole thing, or just the sides, or just the one side you were working on?”

“The sides,” Fenris clarified. “Both of them.”

“Oh, phoo.” Fenris could hear Isabela pouting. “Here I thought I could trick you into something asymmetrical.”

“You played your hand too soon,” Fenris let out a mock sigh. “You needed to start with mullets and bowl cuts and pigtails, if you wanted to make asymmetry sound appealing.”

“If you had pigtails I could pull them,” Isabela lamented. “There’s just something about your perfect pretty face that makes me want to ruin it.”

She drew the razor up over his ear to sheer away at the white hairs behind it. And, in spite of himself, Fenris felt himself tense. He was letting someone else hold a razor that close to his eye, his cheek, his ear, his neck.

“Was it what I said?” Isabela laughed. “And here I thought you trusted me implicitly~” her lament continued. She threaded her other hand through his hair, and massaged until he relaxed enough that she could start.

Fenris eased into her grip, putty in her hands. He wondered what he should say- He’d trusted her with parts of his past he’d never shared with anyone else. He’d trusted her with his body, his sex, his brands. And his dreams. He’d trusted her to have her disagreements with him. And there had been frustrations, sure, but he’d never felt Isabela had done anything to undermine the gravity of what he had struggled to share with her. So it wasn’t that he truly thought she would hurt him. It was just a reflex – that feeling that you always needed to be checking over your shoulder. Really, he’d given Isabela as much of himself as he could. If it wasn’t enough, he wasn’t sure what more she could possibly want.

“It’s okay,” Isabela placated. “I don’t think I’ve ever completely managed it either.”

It sounded like a bunch of tosh to Fenris. Or an excuse. But he hadn’t disagreed with her because he was afraid he just didn’t understand, and he didn’t want to look foolish.

He thinks now he was right the first time. It had probably been an excuse. They would have had to say goodbye at the end either way. Sometimes you need an excuse to justify that sort of thing.

==

Maybe not today, or tomorrow, or even a year from now, but Fenris will run out of coin from his time with Hawke eventually. And then he and his companions won’t have a place to stay. And what then?

He checks at taverns and bulletins for mercenary jobs he refuses to take. Varania keeps pestering him, telling him to take a job. She doesn’t care if he has to kowtow to the whims of the Laetans or Atlus, doesn’t even care if he has to hunt down other escaped slaves if it gives them the means to a better life. And worse, there’s part of him that considers it. A plan to put on the back burner, in the event he’s unable to find another solution. How is it any different from everything else he’s done to get here? What is one person he drags back or kills, if it provides the means to stay here a little longer until he can figure out how to save the rest of them? But- _Fasta Vass!_ \- How arrogant! To save even one person feels as if it should take a miracle – he should make sure he can save one before he starts sacrificing others on the alter of this cause. He is losing himself.

And Merrill. She is so hard to dismiss here. The people she talks with, and teaches, and gives of herself to are real. Real people with real problems – ones he cannot write off so easily as those of the privileged fools in Kirkwall. And it touches on an impossible old dream – all the times Fenris had dared to hope during his days on the run that someone, anyone, might be there to save him from the pain or loneliness. And it’s made bitter because the question that comes to mind and seizes him is whether or not he might have dared to trust Merrill, to come to her door as people do now to ask for magic or food or counsel, if he had met her earlier in his life.

He will not play second fiddle to her, not here, not now. But it feels like every day and every moment here in Tevinter might shatter him, and he does not know how to help anyone but himself.

It’s dusk. The floodplains are covered with refugees. Fenris finds a place among the lots where vagrants have set a cooking fire, and kicks a hot coal out from under it. He kicks it to a dark corner and wipes the burn off his foot and onto his leggings. When the coal cools, he picks it up and studies it.

He looks too distinctive with his white lyrium markings. So he rubs the coal over them, blending dark stains into dark skin. And when he’s done with that he rubs the rest over his palms and dirties his hair. The end result is patchy and blotchy – but the pitch contrasts less with his complexion than the shining lyrium, and once the sun has set, he doesn’t think anyone will notice if they’re not looking closely. His markings won’t show, not unless he uses them to reach through the Fade. And he doesn’t need that – not now, not today. He’s a talented warrior even without the full use of his abilities. He’ll make it simple – simple, clean deaths for people who deserve so much worse.

When night comes, he leaves for the quarter of the city where the Magisters have their mansions, for the first time since he’s been back.

==

Fenris startles, where he is beginning to doze in his seat at the table.

Dawn has not yet broken, there’s a rapid knock at the door, and everyone seems to move at once. Merrill and Varania hold up their palms, and throw the room alight with fire. Fenris’s sword is piled next to his armour on the table in front of him, washed in a filthy puddle of seawater and left for polishing. He reaches for it instinctively, but Merrill catches his eye and presses a finger to her mouth to warn silence into him. She pads to the door in her sleep robe, while Varania hangs behind. His sister narrows her eyes suspiciously at his coal stained hair and skin, before seeming to decide she won’t be falling back to sleep for a third time that night. She pulls a frumpy brown dress over her slip, before going to catch up with the frantic whispers exchanged at the door.

It is torturous waiting, and Merrill and Varania seem to be in no hurry to relieve his anticipation when the door shuts. Merrill immediately pulls off her robe, and begins to don her green vestments, gaiters, chain mail. Varania paces and bites at her nails, and then forcefully pulls an apron over her dress.

“Well?” Fenris finally forces himself to ask. “What is it?”

“There was a murder in this city’s Hightown. Someone saw an elf flee to the Northwest quarter of the city.” Merrill says, distracted by the latches on her armour. “The state police have apparently taken that to mean they should conduct random searches and question every elf in sight. They’re pulling apart people’s homes. I’ve been asked to go intervene, in my capacity as First.”

“They’ll arrest you and sell you at the auction block!” Fenris hisses. “You don’t have papers!”

“They won’t.” Merrill isn’t even facing him. She is facing the wall, considering Voracity and Vir Tasallan, before leaving both staves in their place. She drops to her knees instead, and digs through her pack to find a familiar dagger. She pulls it from its leather sheathe, and presses it sideways against her thumb, not drawing blood, but testing its sharpness against her skin.

Before Fenris can react, Varania speaks up.

“Wait!” Varania’s all thumbs and shaking hands, as she digs through her apron and unhinges a pocket sewing kit. She fumbles with its contents before dragging out a pin, and handing it out to Merrill. “More subtle,” she says.

Merrill accepts it without a pause. Tests its point and, finding it sufficient, tucks the pin under her wristband and stows the dagger back in her pack.

Before she departs, Merrill finally turns to meet Fenris’s face. She apparently finds more there than his disapproval, because her face goes limp with sympathy.

“Oh, Fenris,” she sighs. “It’s not so bad. I can handle it. I _will_ handle it,” she assures him. “Though it might be nice if you warned us in advance next time, just so we’re not caught off guard in our jammies like this without a plan.”

There’s a gasp from Varania. Fenris’s eyes shoot over towards her, where she has pressed a hand over her mouth.

Merrill ignores her steadfastly. “Don’t go anywhere,” she warns him. “I’ll be right back. I’ll take care of it. You’ll see.”

She departs, and Fenris sits uselessly at the table. He remembers how Merrill had dodged his question about what she had done to convince an officer she’d simply left her identification papers at home. How Fenris had let her dodge the question because he already suspected the answer and it was easier to bury his head in the sand, and now he’s sick. Sick because Merrill is walking around twisting people’s thoughts, compelling them with her blood. Sick moreso because he’s relying on her now to use that power to clean up after a mess _he_ made.

But there is barely time to contemplate this, before Varania descends on him.

“Did you think I would not find out? That I wouldn’t know?” Varania demands in quiet, furious whispers. She repeats herself a dozen more times, changing her phrasing, adding and subtracting curses and pleas and insults, but never really changing the content or intent or frantic energy with which she speaks.

The question seems so absurd to Fenris. He wore a poor disguise only meant to let him blend in as any other impoverished elf to those who weren’t looking. A night out that suspiciously coincided with burglary and murder. He’d meant to hide himself from many people, but not these ones he lives with. Merrill would know, and Anders would know, and they would both expect it and not be surprised. He had counted Varania among their number without thinking further on it.

Atlus mages dead in their beds. And it had been so easy to dart in the shadows and evade the guards and even, he thinks, pick the least opulent estate and the easiest to break into. Or maybe any estate would have been that easy. Maybe all of this has just gotten too easy for him, after Kirkwall. At one time the magisters had loomed in his head larger than life – too terrifying and dangerous to face alone. But they are so soft and easily bled, and when he fears them now it is mostly insofar as they are a vermin that cannot be excised by picking them off one by one.

Fenris doesn’t answer Varania’s question. Instead he flips his hand and drops a rattling sack of coin on the table. It isn’t much. Only what he grabbed from the vanity and desk in the estate’s master bedroom. And only coin – nothing novel or unique, to connect the loot with the crime committed.

“You wanted me to work. To bring coin,” he says. Even though by all means it’s a poor payment for the gravity of what he may have brought down upon them.

“That is not the point!” Varania hisses. She’s pacing the apartment like a caged dog, rubbing anxiously at her arms. “Why would you do something like this? Do you intend to bring the police down upon us? To what end? From the likes of us, of _me_ , they’ll seek no explanation, ask no questions. You may as well have sentenced me yourself. And for what? What were you even trying to accomplish?”

Fenris wants to answer, but instead he hesitates. Something like shame washes over him.

It had been deceptively easy to talk about this aboard Isabela’s ship, under the influence of wine and love. Isabela had laughed and called him a golden hearted fool, said they’d all go the same way in the end. But she’d reached for his hand, and with the other tucked a few strands of hair behind his ear, and agreed to bring him to Minrathous without further question. And Merrill, who had no sense of when she was not wanted, had chimed in. Said it was a great idea. Asked if she might come along. Because she was everso interested in meeting Tevinter elves, maybe ones who didn’t perpetually act like they’d stubbed their toe on a doorjamb. And Fenris had snarled and cursed her, and said he was not the decider of where she went or what she did. But secretly he’d been encouraged by her enthusiasm.

But it is much harder now to recall that feeling of elation and hope. He’s keenly aware that he has saved no one. Two magisters are dead, and more will rise to fill their places. Their estate and all its slaves will be turned over to their heirs. And in the meantime there will only be disruption and chaos. And maybe the slaves would be beaten for not realising until it was too late that the household had been breached and their masters dead. Or maybe there was no point in looking for a rationale – the slaves would been beaten simply at the capricious and sadistic whims of whoever held their lash, just as they always were.

Fenris knows he has not saved anyone. He has only taken out his frustrations blindly and efficiently, in the only way he knows how. Because this is all he’s good at – killing. And it doesn’t matter that Aveline had praised him for his keen and observant nature. That Isabela had giggled and purred at his love-making. That Fenris had struggled in Kirkwall for his literacy and intellect and triumphed. He is as he has always been, as Danarius had made him: a living weapon, only good for one thing.

“Well?!” Varania prompts.

Fenris still wants to try though, even if he only had broken and faltering words. “I- I wanted to start something. I want the magisters dead. I want an end to this place – the blood magic sacrifices, the beating overseers, this dilapidated capital that’s only held together with the labour of slaves. I hoped to incite something. Rally people to freedom.”

Varania stops pacing to laugh. Or at least Fenris thought it was a laugh, but then Varania’s hands fly to her face, and she crumples into the chair across the table from him. And Fenris realises her laughter is only sobs. He watches uncomfortably, as she wrestles herself under control. She lets her hands drop, and wrings them together, before glaring at him.

“Do you think anyone will thank you for this?” Varania asks. “Did you think I would? Let’s say you don’t bring the officials down on our heads and have us arrested and executed for nothing. Let’s say everything goes as planned and you spark, what- slave rebellions, a civil war? Then what?” she demands. “The magisters are the only thing between us and Qunari. They’ll descend the second you’ve managed to upend the Imperial Circle.” Varania’s laugh is a bitter, broken thing. “If you think I’d rather submit myself to the Ben-Hassrath and have my lips sewn shut than be a slave again, you couldn’t be more wrong.”

“I- That is-”

Varania gives him a smug look, like she’s cornered him, and Fenris feels frustrated nearly to tears. Because she’s right, probably even more than she knows: Not only would Tevinter slaves be thrust to the mercy of the Qun if the magisters fell, it might be all of Thedas. He thinks of how revolting he found Tallis’s devotion. How the Arishok would have hauled Isabela away and submitted her to the qamek, if Hawke had let them. And he had joked with Anders once- _We could join the Qun together. I'd be happy to sew your mouth shut._ Except those words had been for the obstinate Anders who would never shut up and never let anything lie, who always had a challenging quip or cruel comment. But the Anders slouched on the floor hasn’t said a word for months, and Fenris thinks vividly of what it would be to pierce a needle into his lips and draw a thread through the blood, to make sure he’d never speak again. And how it would be the same for Merrill, and Varania.

“Do you expect me to have an answer for you?” Fenris demands. “I have no plans to inadvertently subjugate myself, or anyone, to yet another form of slavery – which is all the Qun preaches. But that cannot excuse what the magisters are doing now. It is a problem that there must be a contingency for, but it cannot be a reason to do nothing.”

Varania is a portrait of fury, but her arguing is cut off by a soft croak from the corner that surprises them both.

“No,” Anders says.

For a second, Fenris thinks the mage has broken his silence solely to disagree with him, and it’s a relief. Of course a mage would see no problem with throwing the masses to the slavers if it meant he and his kind were not in danger of having their mouths sewed. And that’s exactly why Fenris should not worry for them. It’s good the mage is talking again, arguing and cruel and obnoxious, being the kind of person that Fenris can be at ease to fight and threaten and condemn – condemn to the Orlesian Chantry, to the Templars, to the Qun, to an eternity of silent suffering.

But Anders’s eyes flash briefly blue, and he continues. And though his voice is raspy and quiet, it holds a firmness and conviction that brooks no room for disagreement. “No, it cannot be a reason to do nothing. Fenris is right. The cruelties of the Imperium and its Magisters cannot be overlooked for fear of greater wrongs. Things cannot go on as they are. Until there is justice, there can be no peace.”

Anders is looking directly at him. And Fenris closes his eyes and turns away, fighting the bitterness that was curling in his stomach. That’s all Anders has to say, all he has ever had to say. And Fenris isn’t sure why he expects any different from the man now. Only there are no answers in the words – no course forward, only the knowledge that they can not stand still and can not go back. And how Fenris hates Anders and his demon and all their true and haunting words that are only vapid nothings. Nearly as much as he hates himself for latching onto those vapid nothings, because here is someone, _anyone_ , who believes in the things he’s saying. Who hasn’t left him to fend of Varania’s counterarguments alone.

Varania cradles her face in her hands once more, and mumbles something about how they will be the death of her. And Fenris doesn’t have the energy to reassure her when he thinks she’s exactly right.

**Author's Note:**

> Sad I couldn’t include it in the story proper, but I have on good authority that when Isabela shoved Anders at Fenris and Merrill at the Minrathous docks, her exact words were “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this.”
> 
> bgm: Of Montreal’s _The Past is a Grotesque Animal_.


End file.
